Just Neighbors, and Then Much More, for 38 Years

Kent and Jeanne Henriksen grew up as neighbors. "I had the biggest crush," she says. He says he realized one day, "This little girl across the street is growing up.”

Booming’s “Making It Last” column profiles baby boomer couples who have been together 25 years or more. Send us your story and photos through our submission form.

Kent and Jeanne Henriksen grew up across the street from each other in a Los Angeles suburb. They began dating as teenagers and have been married for 38 years. The couple now lives in Pleasant Hill, Ore., where Jeanne is a dental hygienist and Kent a vice president at PeaceHealth Medical Group, a division of PeaceHealth Hospital Organization. They have two adult children. A condensed and edited version of our conversation follows.

How did you meet?

Jeanne: We don’t remember. When I came home from the hospital at 2 days old, my future in-laws were invited over to meet me. He was just always there.

Kent: We were more than neighbors. Her grandparents baby-sat me; my parents baby-sat her. My dad would play ball with her. I went to her birthday parties.

Jeanne: By the time I was in eighth grade and Kent, who’s three years older was in high school, I had the biggest crush. He was interested in the girl next door who was a cheerleader. I would climb up this tree in our yard and watch them. I sat for hours doodling our initials together.

Kent: One summer Jeanne went away to visit relatives in Alaska and when she came back I thought, “This little girl across the street is growing up.” She looked so nice and I invited her out. It was our first date.

Jeanne: I was 17 and starting my senior year of high school and he was at U.C. Irvine. After he called I put down the phone and was ready to scream with joy when I realized that his parents would be able to hear me through the screen doors. He had a Chevy Super Sport I was excited to ride in, but picked me up in his dad’s old Ford, which had bench seats. What a player.

Were you exclusive from then on?

Jeanne: We had such a good time and he dropped me off and drove two hours back to his school. Unbeknown to me he was dating another girl at the university. He would take us out on alternate weekends.

Kent: This is not my proudest moment. The logistics of it just got too crazy. At one point I took them both to events at the Santa Monica Civic Center on consecutive nights; the parking attendant was the same guy both nights and I got nervous. I realized I had to make a choice. I just stopped talking to the other girl. Jeanne was the one that I liked best.

Jeanne: After that we dated exclusively.

How long before you were engaged?

Jeanne: We got married when I was 21, so it was about four years. In the meantime he graduated from U.C. Irvine and I went to Loma Linda University, a private Seventh-day Adventist church school. Kent and his friend Alan had always planned to travel the world when they graduated and in 1975 they actually followed through. He just left with plans to be gone for a year. I cried my eyes out. We didn’t talk about staying together or breaking up. He left and we wrote letters to each other.

Kent: My buddy and I had saved money and headed for South America. I was not being sensitive to her feelings at all. I left her behind to have this adventure, but I wrote all the time. We were gone about three or four months and I just really missed her, so I came back home. I ended up in Florida and took a Greyhound bus from Miami to L.A. because it was $11 cheaper than the direct flight.

Jeanne: He had a little money left, so we talked about taking a trip to Europe, but neither of our parents were thrilled by the idea of us traveling together unmarried. And he turned to me and said, “Why don’t we just get married?” We did, three weeks later, June 15, 1975.

Jeanne: I burned them. There was some pretty X-rated stuff in them. After reading some letters his parents had written each other, I thought, “Do I want my kids to read these letters?” I lived for those letters while he was away, but I don’t regret burning them.

Do you feel like you missed out by not dating others and experimenting when you were young?

Jeanne: I’ve never regretted one moment with him. Sure, if my life had gone a different way I probably could have been happy with someone else. But why would I go searching for some phantom guy when you have the one you love right there?

Kent: She is the only one. We’re very happy with what we have. I’m also a guy who has liked the same flavor of ice cream for 60 years; I’m not a person who needs lots of adventure.

Photo

Of their 38 years, she says, "Why would I go searching for some phantom guy when you have the one you love right there?" He says: "She is the only one."

What were the early years of marriage like?

Jeanne: After our wedding we took a three-month honeymoon. We got in my El Camino and drove all the way across Canada, down through D.C. and west back to California with $1,000, camping in national parks and eating beans and noodles.

Kent: If we had three months again we would do it in a heartbeat. Having only $1,000 never seemed like a problem. We came back and I had no job and she was studying to be a dental hygienist. We had a couple hundred bucks left that we used to get an apartment before I got a job in I.T. Most of my salary went to paying her tuition, but it never felt insurmountable.

Jeanne: We had our first fight about that apartment. I loathed it. It was a horrible place near the Air Force base in San Bernardino. Money was so tight, we kept track of every penny. I have a ledger where I wrote down that I paid three cents for a stamp.

What about children?

Kent: We had moved into a little house that we were fixing up and our friends were starting to have babies, so we decided maybe it was time. A month later Jeanne was pregnant.

Jeanne: It went a lot faster than we thought. Our second was born four years later. Parenting was easy, probably because we had so much commonality growing up. Our parents had a similar Midwestern approach to kids. We never disagreed about child rearing.

Jeanne: It could have been, but wasn’t. I am Seventhday Adventist and Kent was Lutheran. My religion dictates that we eat vegetarian and go to church on Saturdays.

Kent: When my father died of colon cancer I started eating vegetarian as well and I realized I liked the values of the Seventhday Adventists so I converted. Jeanne had never pushed and was really sensitive and realized this had to be a personal decision. It was hard on my mother who felt it was a rejection of the values she’d instilled in me.

Jeanne: Looking back I may have done some things differently. Kent’s mother wanted so badly to baptize them Lutheran, which I thought was bogus. So badly that she actually did it secretly and we found out years later. She felt so fervently about it she just wanted to cover all her bases. If I had it to do again I would have because it would have made her so happy.

What did you disagree about?

Jeanne: We had roaring fights about finances. They say you fight about family, sex or money and we picked money. His parents were very careful about spending and my mother would always say, “You have to live a little.”

Kent: We aren’t rich, but we have always done well; we just have different philosophies about money and have never been able to fix that. It doesn’t take a lot for this argument to bubble up; it can be a simple remark that rubs the other the wrong way.

Jeanne: All it takes is for him to say, “How much is that going to cost?” We fight about whether he’s being careful and I am being cavalier. We were on a long run together once and I realized that it’s more that he holds me hostage about it a little bit. Even for spending $100, he’ll say, “We’ll think about it.” I figured out that it’s a little bit about having the power.

Kent: In 38 years you learn to fight very efficiently. It will start fast and end just as quickly. I’m not an expert in fighting. I am an only child so I didn’t have anyone to fight with and Jeanne had a sister so she was a lot more verbal. She would just do me in. But we’ve figured out how to fight in a profitable manner so that we end up telling each other what we’re feeling.

Jeanne: We do have the rule that we never go to sleep mad at each other. It’s meant that at times, we’ve stayed up until 4 a.m. And we never fight on the phone.

There have been periods when Kent has worked in other cities; did the long-distance separation affect your marriage?

Jeanne: It was harder for him than for me. He’s made so many sacrifices to provide for us.

Kent: It is just the nature of things when you live in a town of 100,000. I took a job at Kaiser Permanente in San Jose and we bought a little condo that we called Camp San Jose. I would come home on the weekends or Jeanne would come visit for a weekend. It was hard because I was leaving home and it was hard to develop new relationships because I was always leaving there, too. But I had a kid in college and one high school age in boarding school. If the kids had been younger we would have all gone together. It was hard but it helped my career until I was able to get a job closer to home.

What do you think has made it last for 38 years?

Kent: We are just compatible. I am a mellow guy and I am flexible. Jeanne has very strong opinions about everything. Sometimes it drives me crazy but she just brings energy to my life and moves me out of my comfort zone. I provide some stability for her and she gets me to do things I wouldn’t normally do. We have had this shared life since the time we were 3 and 6 years old. I think we both can’t imagine what it would be like without the other.